UFO Sightings and Politics

This is a presidential election year, so let’s discuss UFO sightings and politics.

Currently, former White House chief of staff John Podesta has been advocating that Hillary Clinton get to the bottom of the UFO disclosure story if she’s elected.

But from this reporter’s perspective, the politics problem is a whole lot bigger than just a new president burning political capital to get the long-asked UFO disclosure story answered.

This issue really boils down to research money, and in our system of government analysis, the purse strings are held by Congress. The truth is, getting any kind of serious research done, like the kind that is done by the National Academy of Science, requires congressional support in the form of funding.

If we’re talking about Congress, then we have to talk about voter numbers. In 2012, the National Geographic Channel sponsored a national poll to measure interest on the topic of UFOs. The poll indicated that 36 percent of Americans people believe in UFOs. In New York state, 36 percent translated to about 7.11 million, or most of upstate. The poll also found that 47 percent of Americans were on the fence about the topic and 17 percent flat out didn’t believe in UFOs.

The poll also revealed that 80 percent believe the government is hiding what it knows about UFOs. Nationally, that’s about 255 million, here in New York state, its 15.8 million of our 19.75 million residents. That’s a lot of voters who are interested in the topic of UFOs, who also think that the government isn’t being square with us.

Politicians in Congress like numbers. Unfortunately, no agency of the United States government has publicly collected data on UFOs since 1968. The task of collecting data about UFOs sighting has fallen to privately-funded and civilian-operated organizations like the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).

In April and May of 2013, the Paradigm Research Group (PRG) hosted the first Citizen Hearings on Disclosure. The 30 hours of hearings were designed to look and feel like Congressional hearings and even employed several former congressional representatives to chair the proceedings. The major media yawned, made fun and most certainly ignored the proceedings.

Last year, the PRG sent a full set of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure DVDs to every congressional staff on Capitol Hill. Strong efforts are afoot to lobby Congress into hosting real hearings on UFOs and the truth embargo. So far nobody in the U.S. Congress publicly called for UFO Disclosure Hearings.

Let’s think about this for a moment. Getting a congressperson to call for hearings about UFOs carries a stiff stigma that’s been culturally reinforced for over 50 years. In my opinion, what is needed is a team effort to given any one congressperson cover. This could be done by a Congressional caucuses calling for such hearings.

In that line of thinking, I have compiled a statistical list of 50 years worth of New York state UFO sightings. I have painstakingly ranked those UFO sighting statistics by New York Congressional Districts in the chart below.

Click to enlarge.

As you can see from the data presented, there are many New York Congressional Districts that have large amounts of UFO activity reports. Of the 4,098 UFO sightings represented on the chart, 3,163 of them occurred in the past 15 years — that is 77 percent. The United States logged over 71,000 sightings from 2001 through 2015, and UFO sightings are on the rise.

As you can see from the chart, the 27th district in Western New York and the 21st district in the North country are UFO hotspots. If you want to contact your congress person, click here to find out what your district is and how to get in touch with your representative.

I believe the New York Congressional caucus as a whole should advocate loudly for UFO disclosure hearings and fund research into what exactly has been going on for all these years. After all, New York state hosts 3-5 percent of the world UFO sightings on a yearly basis and ranks 5th in the nation for high volume UFO sightings.